Visibly, a startup built for the blue- and green-collar industries, has raised €7 million led by Creandum, the European backer of Spotify and Klarna, with participation from existing investors Seedcamp, Brighteye Ventures, Triple Point and other prominent business angels.
Visibly was founded in 2021 by Kane St Quintin, who previously built construction company Pickr. Since then, the team has grown to include Chief Learning Officer Kirsten Campbell-Howes (ex-Busuu, Chegg). The latest round of funding will be used to build the Visibly team. Alongside hiring, Visibly will accelerate product development and the breadth of regulated certifications it offers to keep pace with its growing customer base.
Kane St Quintin, Founder and CEO at Visibly, said: “Think of someone digging a hole (excavating). Sounds simple, but hit a high-pressure pipeline and you’ve got fatal consequences. It’s a dangerous task – so how is it taught? In a classroom, with a 20-question written assessment. This is clearly ridiculous. It’s situations like this – and their larger-scale impact – that we’ve set out to change.”
The UK infrastructure sector is centuries old and heavily regulated, particularly when it comes to training. Regulations are important for an industry with such a high physical risk – but historically they’ve been interpreted by legacy training providers in a way that keeps prices high, creates barriers to entry and stops workers getting the training they need to do their jobs safely.
In practice, certification programmes involve archaic classroom-based training that stays the same for years – regardless of any developments in technology, or standards – and has little relevance to the real world. The worst case is someone getting injured, or a community being harmed – but the sector has such complex hierarchies and regulations that nobody has attempted to change it.
Visibly was founded to do just that. Its founder, Kane St Quintin, realised that the problem comes from how we interpret these regulations. By modernising the approach, blue- and green-collar workers can get the education they deserve and the built environment can get the expertise it needs.
Visibly’s user-first technology gives workers an education that’s on-demand, adapts to their individual capabilities, and translates to the world around them – as well as access to advantages office workers take for granted when undergoing training, like peer-to-peer feedback and expert-led coaching.
Hanel Baveja, Investor at Creandum, commented: “We’re excited to back the Visibly team in disrupting a massive and completely underserved market in Europe: blue- and green-collar certification and compliance. As we’ve seen with many amazing companies we have partnered with, their unparalleled focus on user experience in a legacy-dominated market and first-hand experience with these problems convinced us that this was the team to back.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/06/london-based-visibly-raises-e7-million-to-rethink-regulated-training-for-the-infrastructure-sector/
